Beyond the Report Card: What are the insights at the county level that we can observe?
An overall look at Academic Achievement across Californian counties
In this analysis, we define academic achievement as the difference between the Grade Cohort Standardize (GCS) Scores and the NAEP standard. As a reminder of the interpretation of GCS scores, we can look at this example again: If 4th-grade students at the school of interest have a GCS value of 5.03, these students’ scores indicate a level equivalent to 5th-grade, which is about one grade level higher than the national average (the reference group) in math.
To create this map, we calculated the difference in GCS scores from the grade levels for each grade-school cohort, then aggregated them by the Californian counties. We divided the score differences into three categories: 1-2 years behind, Less than 1 year behind, and Less than 1 year ahead.
Looking at this map, it is clear that there is a significant difference in academic performance across various regions in California. The Bay Area and Orange County appear to outperform other counties, as do affluent tourist counties like Placer and El Dorado. However, for the remaining counties, while approximately half of them exhibit students with academic performance on par with the national average, a significant proportion of counties have students lagging by 1-2 years.
We recognize that there is likely a wealth disparity among diverse communities in California. Therefore, our next step is to delve deeper into the social factors that contribute to what we’re observing on this map.
Further exploration into the county-level math and reasoning language arts (RLA) achievement of different student groups
Indeed, according to Cano and Hong, California faces challenging income disparities and intricate demographics that extend beyond its public education system. Since 2008, California has implemented extensive reforms to allocate more resources to high-needs students and addressing educational disparities, with some success. However, despite these efforts, Black, Latino, and low-income students continue to significantly underperform compared to Asian American, white, and wealthier students in both math and reading proficiency (Cano and Hong 2022). A UCLA research shows that Californian schools are the most segregated for Latinos, with 58% attending schools that are highly segregated. The study also revealed that over 50% of Black students in California are concentrated in only 25 out of 1,000 school districts (Frankenberg et al. 2019).
Since we’re interested in how different socioeconomic backgrounds might influence education achievement, we looked into how students classified as economically disadvantaged according to the Californian standard perform in GCS score compared to those in the non-economically disadvantaged group. By definition, students are considered economically disadvantaged if they come from a low-income household or meet other criteria for poverty, such as eligibility for free or reduced-price meals, homelessness, or foster care. The criteria for California can be found here. The GCS score differences are broken down into six categories, ranging from being more than two years behind to more than two years ahead compared to the NAEP standard. The GCS categories are also divided into math and RLA for both student groups.